Routing Spammers...

[lwood]

Ha! Having tired yet again of the neverending flood of spammer registrations to the forums on the Westria site, to say nothing of mucking them out every day, I have found a simple answer that is not yet another CAPTCHA, 'cos, you know, "hate with the white-hot fury of a million suns" is about how I feel about CAPTCHA.

And I'm not thrilled with the automated spam site checker mods for my chosen forum software, because it means more mucking and some small chance of false positives.

Just found a guy, however, who wrote a mod that asks simple math questions on the reg page. If you don't know that 2+4=6 (et al), you get no cookie from me.

I have written away for it, and await with bated breath.

-- Lorrie

Comments

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

That's a reasonably cool idea, but there are a lot of sites using similar CAPTCHAs.

Let's be honest, these are basically a text-only CAPTCHA by a different name. The idea here is, "Do something that's easy for people, but hard for computers", it's just that in this case, the "something" is "read and understand a sentence" rather than "parse letters out of an image".

Anyway, whether you consider these CAPTCHAs, or want to call them by another name, the fact is that there are lots of places using them, and sooner or later spammers are going to pay somebody a few thousand bucks to write something that automatically figures it out. After all, it's not like math is hard (especially for computers).

You know what woudl really be totally the bomb for the Westria site? Instead of asking math questions, ask Westria-oriented trivia questions. Never having read a word of Westria, I can't give examples, but substituting in Babylon 5 (as a fandom that I know we're both acquainted with), imagine questions like: To prove that you're a human, please tell me...

• who becomes John's wife?
  
• Garibaldi's favorite cartoon character
  
• What was the last, best hope for peace?
  
• Which race has no telepaths

Things like that. Totally easy for anyone who'd be bothering with a B5 site, but practically impossible for spammers... and it's even appropriate to the site's subject matter, which just makes it cool instead of an annoying little thing.

[emberleo.livejournal.com]

True, but depending on how hard or trivially easy the questions are, you might lose people who have bought the book, and are interested, but haven't read 'em yet ;p

Like ME.

--Ember--

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Let's be honest, these are basically a text-only CAPTCHA by a different name.

You're right, of course, this is a text-based CAPTCHA, whereas it's the image-based ones I rant about.

Right now, I'm lokoing for speed bumps, like many other forum moderators. And, as emberleo points out, requiring a trivia check rather loses the casual reader. And, unfortunately, as I *cough, shuffle feet* don't code, it's difficult for me to achieve--whereas a text-only captcha is something I can install, and use.

-- Lorrie